The World's Game Is Not Just A Game

By Simon Kuper

Published: May 26, 2002

In early 1994, Osama bin Laden spent three months in London, where he visited supporters and bankers and went to watch the famous soccer club Arsenal four times. Before returning to Sudan just a step ahead of being extradited to Saudi Arabia, he bought his sons gifts from the club's souvenir shop. His affection for the game did not stop him from getting involved in a plot to massacre the American and British teams at the 1998 World Cup in France; still, bin Laden told friends he had never seen passion like that of soccer fans.

This seems to have been a common view inside Al Qaeda. On the videotape the Department of Defense released in December of bin Laden reminiscing with a foreign sheik about the Sept. 11 attacks, soccer crops up twice. The first time, bin Laden recalls a follower telling him a year earlier: ''I saw in a dream, we were playing a soccer game against the Americans. When our team showed up in the field, they were all pilots!'' In the dream, Al Qaeda won the game.

On the same videotape, another Qaeda member recounts watching a television broadcast of the World Trade Center attacks. ''The scene was showing an Egyptian family sitting in their living room. They exploded with joy. Do you know when there is a soccer game and your team wins? It was the same expression of joy.''

Bin Laden and his henchmen had hit on a truth about soccer. The sport, which in the U.S. is chiefly a placid entertainment for children, arouses in the rest of the world collective passions that are matched by nothing short of war. And unlike any other sport -- indeed, unlike almost any cultural phenomenon -- soccer is distinguished by its political malleability. It is used by dictators and revolutionaries, a symbol of oligarchy and anarchy. It gets presidents elected or thrown out, and it defines the way people think, for good or ill, about their countries.

The World Cup, which begins on Friday in Japan and in South Korea, will be watched by billions. The spread of satellite dishes has taken the world's best teams to the farthest-flung places. People in Shenyang or Khartoum, who have no idea that Manchester is a town in England, now support Manchester United. A statue of the team's star, David Beckham, adorns a Buddhist temple in Bangkok. Osama bin Laden, if he is alive, will presumably be among those billions sitting in front of the television, and all of them, with the exception of most Americans, will appreciate the roiling political context in which the game is so often played.

Leaders everywhere attach themselves to soccer. In 1986 Silvio Berlusconi, then an Italian media mogul, took over his favorite club, AC Milan, which was struggling to surmount a 1979 bribery scandal. By 1989 Milan was rich, organized and champion of Europe. Berlusconi then founded the political party Forza Italia (named after a soccer chant), called his candidates the Azzurri (''the Blues,'' nickname of the national team) and in 1994 got himself elected prime minister. The far-right Austrian politician Jörg Haider has buffed up his image as a regular guy by presiding over the FC K* rnten soccer club; Brazilian politicians habitually campaign in shirts of favorite clubs; and in British local elections this month the town of Hartlepool, given its first chance to elect a mayor, rejected the ruling Labour Party candidate in favor of the local soccer team's mascot, a man in a monkey suit.

But perhaps the best place to observe the interplay of soccer and politics today is Argentina, whose national team has won two World Cups and is the joint favorite with France to win this one, and whose economy is plunged into a depression deeper than that of the U.S. in the 1930's.

On a gray English day last November, a mustachioed Argentine multimillionaire named Mauricio Macri visited Oxford University. Like Berlusconi in Italy, Macri took over a struggling soccer club -- Boca Juniors from Buenos Aires, which became for a time the best in Latin America. Now, seven years later, Macri has decided to enter politics, and over a lunch of soggy chops, he explained that he would first try for governor of Buenos Aires, and after that, who knew?

A month after this conversation, the Argentine peso collapsed. The country's middle class was ejected into the third world, four presidents fell in a fortnight and demonstrations erupted against Argentina's politicians, its banks and the International Monetary Fund. Soon a fashion emerged: protesters began wearing the national team's famous blue-and-white striped shirt with ¡Basta! -- Enough!'' -- written on the back. The last vestige of Argentine glory -- its soccer team -- was being used to humiliate the establishment.

By the time I arrived in Buenos Aires late last month, Macri, though he as yet held no political office, was in Washington discussing the catastrophe with members of Congress and the former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker. Many Argentines told me that before long Argentina might have its first ''soccer president.''